Musical Spoofing

“Why do I love Milli Vanilli’s Girl, You Know It’s
True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its
soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it’s
great because the people involved were ‘talented’? Who the hell cares?
It’s not like I’m inviting them to dinner.”

— Ted Friedman

I’ve got a mishmash of interesting notes about musicians who have played
around with this sort of thing (and peripherally relevant items like, say,
the
Soy Bomb Nation).

How hard it seems for people to forgive
Milli Vanilli.
As if anyone who tapped their toes to the catchy tunes or rocked out at one
of their concerts was doing so out of enthusiasm for the artistic integrity
of the performers.

“Droplifting”
is like shoplifting, but even more fun. You make your own recordings of
miscellaneous oddities, burn them onto a
CD, add some
interesting cover art, and sneak them onto the shelves at music stores.

Some clever musicians-rights advocates are battling
MP3-based piracy by spiking on-line distributed music
databases like Napster with MP3 files they call
“cuckoo’s eggs”
that are named as though they were reproductions of copyrighted songs but
which actually contain other sounds.

The musical group known as
KLF,
incorporated culture jamming tactics both in their music and in their
extramusical antics, which included setting fire to £1,000,000.

Fritz Kreisler,
a fine violinist, had a hard time finding an appreciative audience for his
own compositions, so he started writing them in the style of famous
composers and passing them off as obscure or recently-uncovered works of
the great masters.

The BBC
broadcast what it claimed to be the avant-garde composition of a
Polish visionary but what was in fact the work of BBC
employees making random noise.
“We dragged together all the
instruments we could find and went around the studio banging
them.” The composition, Mobile for Tape and
Percussion by Piotr Zak was a twelve-minute cacophony that merited
serious reviews in the Daily Telegraph and the London
Times before the hoax was revealed.

And in a sort of harmony with Mr. Zak, there is the famous diva
Florence Foster Jenkins,
whose singing was so awful that she sold out Carnegie
Hall in her final performance. Hip irony, circa 1944.

A techno deejay by the name of Scanner sent lookalikes to play a 16-concert
tour of Europe and America while he kicked back in the recording studio.
“It’s being avant garde with a sense of humour. It was
meant to be amusing and a play on the idea of techno being faceless, that
sort of thing. The fact that no-one’s acknowledged it wasn’t me makes it
even funnier.”

And then there’s the fantastic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
According to one source, “[a]udiences at the film’s initial
test screens back in the early 1980s were quite negative. They didn’t
understand that the film was satirizing rock documentaries, so they
complained that the filmmakers should have found a better band or a less
obscure one.”

Jello Biafra has been known to
get creatively confrontational. And the “artists of
appropriation” known as
NegativLand
have become audio outlaws
for flying in the face of copyright laws in their relentless parody.

The punk rock anarchists known as Crass pulled a few pranks in their day.
They arranged to include a flexidisk of a song called
“Our Wedding”
in the teenybopper magazine Loving. Nobody at the magazine had
gotten around to actually listening to the song first, though, and
they had to apologize later for including this
“sneering attack on love and
marriage” with a title
“too obscene to
print” in their magazine.
Check out our News Trolls section for
info about another great Crass hack.

On the
Magnus-Opus
page you can learn about the musicians who have written a number of
compositions that, well, correspond to every tune you might hear when
punching in a phone number. The good part is they’ve copyrighted
their work. I hope you’ve been paying your royalties when you reach out
and touch someone by performing one of their compositions.

In the United States, “local” radio
stations are increasingly being taken over by a small number of huge
national companies that replace local content with canned DJ simulations
and a one-size-fits-all setlist. Negativland organized a group of
pirate radio stations in Seattle, Washington, to simulcast a revealing
parody of one of these stations.

Perhaps you’ve heard of 4'33", a John Cage composition that
consists of a pianist sitting down at a piano and playing not a single
note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. More recently,
an artist put out a recording that included a sixty-second track of
silence — and
John Cage’s music publisher has sued
them for unauthorized sampling!

See the
Rocklopedia Fakebandica
for “all the fictional bands and singers from
TV and movies listed in one convenient,
scarily obsessive place.”

And it’s hard to let a discussion of musical hoaxes go by without
mentioning the hyperactive rumor that Paul McCartney is
dead
and that his death has been kept a poorly-guarded secret.

Another Beatle-related hoax had to do with
unreleased recordings
supposedly hiding in the vaults for decades. The rumors, started on a whim
by a fellow named Martin Lewis, have found their way into scholarly
discographies and numerous writinge on the Beatles oeuvre. But the
missing songs were never recorded, or even played, by the fab four.